No sooner had we posted this than @artists_talking tweeted the link. @artists_talking has 1,516 followers on Twitter. Sadly, I can’t get figures on the membership of a-n, although I would guesstimate that we’re talking 10s of 1,000s. Even allowing for the inevitably high overlap between these two networks, that’s a lot of people who just got exposed to the existence of sign language poetry!

We’ll be posting more soon, with an upcoming blog relating to a-n’s current hot topic #digitalpartners, followed by a blog from Fliss Watts (www.watermellon.co.uk), the first artist from the Collective to stick her head above the parapet and reveal how she’s getting on and the thoughts she’s been having. That’s her self-portrait right there.

I’ve also recently joined The International Coalition for Arts, Human Rights and Social Justice (www.artsrightsjustice.net) so that we can take the People of the Eye’s message to a global audience. We’ll keep you posted on that too.

Away from this whorl of digital posting, People of the Eye will be getting out and about in the real-world when we are represented at the 7th International Conference of the Arts in Society, which will be held in Liverpool from 23-25th July 2012 (http://artsinsociety.com/conference-2012/ ). Our paper is snappily entitled Plasticising Poetic Ephemera? Using Visual Arts Practices to Investigate (British) Sign Language Poetry. Here’s the abstract:

“Does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art?” (Rancière, 2009) So is it art? Is it poetry? Inherently transgressive, sign language poetry is composed and performed in a visual, gestural, spatial medium, relying on image for both form and content and reflecting the cultural experiences of “people of the eye” (Veditz, 1910 cited in Ladd, 2003) As such it challenges traditional assumptions of the literary, and remains invisible to the artworld. Hitherto investigated predominantly by linguists, this paper reports on an ongoing doctoral project which seeks to expose the nature of the image in this hidden artform through the explorations and responses of a collective of artists and poets using various media to research various aspects of selected (British) sign language poems.

If that’s whetted your appetite and you’re going to be heading along to the conference, please come and say ‘Hi’ and retreat to the bar with us.

In a tangential but related move, I’ll be giving a paper at the AHRC’s Researching Multilingually seminar at UWE (Bristol) on 25th and 26th April, 2012( http://researchingmultilingually.com/) where I’ll be describing (and possibly bemoaning) the lot of the multilingual, multidisciplinary, multi-modal researcher with a paper entitled No, this isn’t the data analysis; this is just the consent form….

In 1910 George Veditz*, addressing the Ninth Convention of the American National Association of the Deaf and the Third World Congress of the Deaf, described sign language people as “people of the eye”. He knew a thing or two. Despite 21st Century discourses, for most contemporary sign language people this remains a more precise description than any that involve lack, loss, disability or the practices of medicine.

Visual artists are also ‘people of the eye’. Although they are not defined by a biological imperative (nor subject to medical interference), they nonetheless tend to be people who think, process and conceptualise the world visually.

What better name, then, for the loose collective of sign poets and visual artists I have been gathering together since my last blog post. (Did you miss me? Go on, say you did.)

The People of The Eye so far consist of four esteemed sign poets: John Wilson, Donna Williams, Paul Scott and Richard Carter and a growing number of visual artists working in various media (including sound). Those engaged so far are listed below, each charged with creating a visual response to one of the poems created and selected by the poets. Their response may be to content, form or any other aspect.

We will be communicating across an internet platform; discussing, questioning and creating and are hoping to collectively blog to the wider artworld.

It’s been a lot of work putting it together, but everyone has responded so enthusiastically to the idea that it has also been a great honour.

We’re all very excited about what might emerge, and the mutual understandings these two tribes of visual peoples might find. We’ll keep you posted.

The author

Only a handful of folks globally have studied the poetics of natural sign languages. Nana's PhD investigation evolved from her own practice in theatre and performance interpreting, and took in Derrida, visual art, embodiment, gesture-dance, cinematics, and some musical theory on the way. She continues to translate and interpret whilst developing her own creative practices of 'translation art' and '[w]righting'.

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